Nayaki Nayyar, ‎general manager and global head of IoT and Innovation go-to-market at SAP, says the SAP IoT foundation for HANA extends the back-office reach of SAP into the realm of IoT in a way that will enable businesses to process IoT data in real time using the SAP HANA database and SAP Vora software running on top of Hadoop. IT organizations can either opt to deploy this software on premise or on a cloud platform managed by SAP.

In addition, Nayyar notes that the IoT intelligent edge processing bundle for SAP HANA, which consists of a “streaming lite” component, the edge DB and sync client and the SAP Plant Connectivity software, provides the added benefit of a layer of software that creates a layer of abstraction above a wide variety of IoT gateways and endpoints.

As part of that strategy, SAP announced today a partnership with Dell under which SAP IoT software is now validated to run on Dell IoT gateways. SAP also announced an extension to an existing alliance with Hitachi under which the two companies will collaborate on the development of IoT offerings aimed at specific vertical markets.

Finally, SAP announced it is now reselling IoT deviceWISE software from Telit which, when deployed on top of SAP IoT software, provides a mechanism for managing the overall IoT environment.

To the degree that SAP is an ecosystem in itself, IoT clearly represents an opportunity for SAP to considerably extend its reach beyond providing, for example, manufacturing software. Naturally, just about every other IT vendor has similar ambitions. We will be watching to see to what degree any of them can execute on these ambitions.